SAN DIEGO – Seven hundred square feet. That has been Joan Schomburg's orbit for the last year as the pandemic, little by little, vanquished the few indulgences the 87-year-old San Diego woman used to enjoy.
Confined largely to her one-bedroom upstairs apartment with no husband, no children, no siblings to break the tedium of her largely solitary life, she ticks off the outings she can no longer experience. Monthly book club at the now closed Kensington-Normal Heights library, with a stop afterward at Starbucks for a white chocolate mocha frappuccino. Shopping excursions to Trader Joe's and Ralph's with a volunteer from San Diego ElderHelp. Periodic lectures geared for seniors. A Padres game.
"I'm pretty much stuck here until I go to the doctor," she says of her Normal Heights apartment. "If we have cloudy days or rainy days, that's depressing. There are some days I feel like screaming if things aren't going well, but I don't. Or maybe I have a little bit."
Schomburg, though, isn't prone to brooding. Chatty and affable, she finds comfort in the smallest of things, like the string of orange balloons twinkling at night in her neighbor's yard or watching the wind whip through the trees that she can see from her apartment window. Her weekly grocery order now includes bouquets of flowers, which she fastidiously tends to, trimming them and replenishing their water.
After a fall and hip surgery last year sidelined her for several weeks, Schomburg says she has recently regained her interest in reading and cooking an occasional chicken dish. Her landlord, also a friend, loaned her four books, including a collection of Mister Rogers' writings and a nonfiction tale set during Hitler's rise to power that she just finished.
"Oh, look, there's Leonardo," she says excitedly, mid-sentence, as her landlord's golden retriever greets her outside her front door. "He's wagging his tail like crazy. He's licking my hand right now."
As trying as the last year has been for someone who lives alone, Schomburg, who will soon be getting her second vaccine , says she now is able to see a sliver of a silver lining in the pandemic.
"You realize you can get through it even though it's not fun," she said after pausing a moment to reflect. "A friend came over the other day to get some extra food from Jewish Family Service, and she said, 'I'm alive.'
"That is the bottom line."
